I had an ineteresting conversation with a buddy of mine last night. We'd been reminiscing on popular shows from our childhood, even though I'm a generation removed from him as I'm 9 years his senior. He'd grown up on Reading Rainbow and hadn't realized that LeVar Burton had made his mark long before that with his portrayal of Kunte Kinte in "Roots." With a hint of guilt, he admitted that he'd never seen Roots.

Understandable given his age, but he carries himself maturely, which sometimes makes me forget how young he actually is. Plus he's a film geek, so it was almost assumed that he had for these two reasons. But what struck me was his follow up reason. Besides being from a generation that didn't grow up with the miniseries, he also hadn't seen it because 'he's not black.'

My first thought -- which I probably didn't verbalize very well, but was at least implied -- was that you shouldn't see it because you're black, you should see it because you're an American.

That's the funny thing about American culture. Each generation is supposedly wiser and more enlightened than its predecessor, yet we keep backsliding into the same traps that help keep the rift wide open between the country's races. We hope and expect that each generation learns that closing yourself off or just being apathetic toward other cultures is counterproductive. Not only that, you're missing out on all sorts of life experiences that could help shape you into a better human being.

The core of racial tensions stems from ignorance. The remedy for that, obviously, is (1) educating yourself and, more importantly (2) taking a trip around the block. By 25, you should have at least tasted Hummus . Book learnin' only gets you so far. The equation is incredibly simple: The less you know about others, the less you care. The less you care, the easier it is to hate.

Now don't get me wrong. The guy I'm talking about is far from prejudiced. He's intelligent at times (kidding), insightful, blah blah. If he were a complete ass I wouldn't have anything to do with him. He's just young and sheltered. Hell, he still lives with his parents in the suburbs. The problem is that, from what I can see, he's mostly surrounded by his own people (Mexican). Nothing wrong with that in itself, but the narrow-minded seed is there. A teeny, tiny seed, but there nonetheless.

Case in point is another guy I knew, who I'm glad to say I haven't seen in many years. He was from middle-of-nowhere palookaville, USA and probably didn't know people came shades other than white till moving to Chicago. He was about 21 at the time, but of course thought he had all the answers. He also had a tendency toward getting wasted and pissing in the street between the 2 block span of the bar and his apartment. Classy.

In one of our early conversations, he hit me with the chestnut, 'I don't get why black people can get away with talking so much crap about whites but not the other way around.' Now that's a whole other topic of debate in itself, but the bottom line is the guy DIDN'T KNOW ANY BLACK PEOPLE. A very valid question and smart of him to ask, but the point is given his life up until this moment (no interaction or real conversations with people of color) all he could do was form his own skewed reasonings and opinions of people he didn't know anything about.

But this guy did something that I really wish more kids his age would do. He was smart enough to dig for answers to things like this whenever we hung out. And not digging through what internet bloggers have to say. After a while, it got to be annoying -- I'm not the friggin' representative of the entire black race -- but I was glad he was asking important things vs. cooking up his own nutty answers, keeping them to himself to fester, and spewing hate behind the anonymity of a chat room.

When he was pissing in the street or taking a fake dump on a pool table, he had his moments. Good times.

Get out. Live. Eat Hummus. You may not like it. But at least you tried it.